Square Enix planned 'conservative' relaunch for Final Fantasy 14, due to original game's failure

"Considering the outcome of our first launch, our sales estimates for this one were decidedly conservative," producer Naoki Yoshida said.

Once again, Square Enix is apologizing for Final Fantasy 14. A Realm Reborn is the second launch of Square Enix's Final Fantasy MMO, and the launch has been plagued with server issues. Why was the company so inadequately prepared for launch? Their answer: they didn't expect so many people to forgive them for Final Fantasy 14 right away.

"Considering the outcome of our first launch, our sales estimates for this one were decidedly conservative," producer Naoki Yoshida said. "We believed that there would be a more gradual rise in users over the opening weeks and months."

Instead, the servers were overwhelmed by players that wanted to be there on day one. According to Yoshida's calculations, the total number of concurrent connections would be over 300,000. However, each world server was designed to support a maximum of 5,000 concurrent connections. "When more than 5,000 characters log into a World at once, there is a higher risk of server crashes and login errors. The restoration of crashed servers is usually followed by a rush of players attempting to log back in, which, in turn, puts a strain on our lobby server, and can ultimately have an adverse affect on all of the Worlds," Yoshida explained on the game's forums.

So once again, Square Enix must apologize over Final Fantasy 14. However, this time it's because the game is too popular. Given the dire situation Square Enix found after the first release of the game, perhaps this is a much better problem to have.